Merriam-Webster defines vice as "a moral fault or failing." Lying, presumably qualifies, and in that sense GOP VP candidate Paul Ryan showed himself ready for the job in his speech to the Republican convention on August 29. Here we debunk seven lies worthy of the label.

Eugene Robinson has an excellent piece in the August 16 Washington Post that takes the GOP, and especially Romney surrogate John Sununu to task over intentionally misleading statements about the Affordable Care Act's reduction of payments to Medicare service providers over a 10 year period.

The GOP would like to convince voters that this is "gutting Medicare," when in fact benefits and costs to seniors remain the same under the ACA.

As reported by the Boston Globe GOP VP candidate Paul Ryan sought "millions of dollars from a federal stimulus program he opposed," then "repeatedly denied lobbying the Obama administration for home state aid -- first on a Boston radio station in 2010 and then again on Tuesday in an interview with a Ohio television station."

In 2010 Ryan sent at least five letters to the Department of Energy and the Department of Labor seeking funds for projects in Wisconsin, while publicly attacking the stimulus bill.

David Stockman, budget director for the Reagan administration, has a "must read" op-ed piece in the August 13 New York Times.

Some choice quotes:

Mr. Ryan professes to be a defense hawk, though the true conservatives of modern times — Calvin Coolidge, Herbert C. Hoover, Robert A. Taft, Dwight D. Eisenhower, even Gerald R. Ford — would have had no use for the neoconconservative imperialism that the G.O.P. cobbled from policy salons run by Irving Kristol’s ex-Trotskyites three decades ago. These doctrines now saddle our bankrupt nation with a roughly $775 billion “defense” budget in a world where we have no advanced industrial state enemies and have been fired (appropriately) as the global policeman.

The Romney campaign has attempted to deflect allegations that, as head of vulture-capital firm Bain Capital, he oversaw practices that bankrupted companies and outsourced jobs, by claiming that he left Bain in 1999. The federal disclosure form Romney filed in 2011 as he began his presidential campaign, states that Romney retired from Bain in 1999, claiming "Since February 11, 1999, Mr. Romney has not had any active role with any Bain Capital entity and has not been involved in the operations of any Bain Capital entity in any way."